Page 15 of My Tiny Human Wife

So I make the tower costly. I harden the choke points and seal the weak seams and make the exposed catwalk into the same killing throat that has broken two raiding parties. I set Kalen and the steadiest of the refugees to the work I can trust to their hands, then I walk Avery through the one matter she will not stop arguing: the evacuation. There is an ice cavern two kilometers north, old mining works, a place the noncombatants can be moved if the walls fail. Jonah will lead them out. Mila protests being counted among the children until Avery quietly asks her to be the one the smallest ones follow, and the girl squares her shoulders and accepts a duty in place of a rescue, and I watch her grow a year older in a single breath.

Dareth comes in from the shed on the second night, and this time he does not linger in the doorway measuring exits. He crosses the threshold, sets his weapon on my table, and says, in the shared tongue so that Avery and Jonah can follow him, “I have spent six years being a coward in a commander's coat. I would like to spend whatever remains of me being something better. Tell me where you want me, Commander.” It is the first he has used the title since the valley and meant the old thing by it, the trust and not the rank. I set him on the eastern approach, because he understands how Vakutan units think, and because I would rather have him at my back than any ten soldiers I have ever led.

That night I climb the ladder to the roof array alone and look to the south and the east at once. On both horizons, faint and swelling, the light of engines. The war has always been a thing I went out to meet—on other worlds, in other people’s snow. It has never followed me home, because I have never yet had a home for it to follow me to. Now I have one: seventy sleeping souls, and a tower held together by stubbornness, and a woman who taught me what the walls were ever for. The war has found it at last. It is coming to take it from me the way it has taken everything else I was ever careless enough to love.

I find that I am not afraid in the manner I expected. I am something colder and far more useful. I am resolved.

Avery climbs up to me on the platform. Of course she does. She fits herself against my side in the killing cold and reads the same swelling light I do, and she does not pretend it is anything less than it is.

“They’re really coming,” she says.

“Both of them. By tomorrow.” I do not soften it. She has never thanked me for softening a thing. “This tower may not stand, Avery. You should hear me say it plainly, so that whatever choices arrive, you make them knowing the truth of the odds.”

“I know.” Her hand finds mine. “I’ve known since Okafor’s crawler crested that ridge. I keep waiting to be more scared than I am, and it keeps not coming, and I think it’s because—” She stops, and begins again, quieter. “It’s because I’m not doing it alone this time. Turns out that changes everything.”

I turn her to face me, and I take the cold sharp lines of her face in my two hands, and I make her a vow I have offered no other living soul, having never before owned a thing I was unwilling to lose. “Whatever crosses that threshold tomorrow,” I tell her, “it passes through me before it reaches you. I have spent all my years spending myself on causes that did not deserve the coin. No cause before you ever deserved it. If this tower falls, you will not be inside it. That is not a request I am making of you. It is the one certainty I am able to give.”

She does not argue, which unsettles me more than argument would, because it means she has understood exactly how much I mean it. She only rises onto her toes and rests her forehead against mine, as I once bent to press my own to hers, and we stand a moment longer at the top of the world with two armies burning toward us out of the dark. Then we go down together to make our tower as costly to take as two stubborn people can contrive.

CHAPTER 23

AVERY

By morning the fear finally shows up, right on schedule, and it drags the whole weight of every life in this tower along with it.

Seventy-one people. I counted them again at dawn, the way I count convoy markers, because numbers are the one measure that has never lied to me. Seventy-one people are going to live or die in the next two days on the strength of choices I keep being the one to make, and somewhere around my third cup of hot brown disappointment, the size of that sits down on my chest and declines to move.

Torvak finds me white-knuckled over the console. He doesn’t tell me it will be fine. He has never dressed a hard truth up soft for me, and I would trust him a great deal less if he began now.

“I keep running the numbers,” I tell him, “and the numbers keep coming out with me deciding who lives.” My hands aren’t steady on the panel. “I talk convoys through ridges. I am not qualified to be the reason a scared child sees another winter or does not.”

“No one is qualified for that.” He crouches to my level, folding all that height down until we are eye to eye. “It is not a qualification. It is a weight. And weights are not carried by being worthy of them; they are carried by refusing to set them down.” His hand covers mine on the panel, swallowing it. “And you do not carry this alone. Say it back to me.”

“I do not carry it alone,” I repeat, and the stupid thing is that it helps.

We spend the morning building the thing that might save us, and it is the strangest war council I have ever sat in: a communications engineer, an enemy commander, a Coalition intelligence officer, and a Vakutan operative, all hunched over one scarred table, finishing one another’s sentences about how to set the truth loose on an entire planet at once.

The plan has a shape now. Kalen and I will chain the beacon’s array to every relay we can still raise, turning a single tower’s voice into a whole world’s. Torvak and Dareth own the timing: the evidence goes out the instant the fighting starts, when both armies are too committed to killing each other to stop and jam a signal. Okafor lends the one thing neither side can wave away—a serving Coalition officer’s authentication, stamped over Dareth’s Vakutan intelligence, so that the truth arrives already proven from within both of the powers it indicts.

Okafor is the piece I am still unsure of, right up until she makes me sure.

She has spent a full day and night verifying, shut away with the files and her own service credentials, checking the evidence against records only a serving Coalition officer can reach. When she finally straightens from the terminal, her flawless composure has a crack running clean through it that was not there the day before.

“It is real,” she says. Not to me. To herself, I think, saying it aloud so she is forced to believe it. “I have cross-referenced four of these operations against sealed records. They match. Someone at flag rank has been manufacturing this war for years, and my whole career has been spent as one of the hands that kept the paperwork tidy without ever knowing what it hid.” She looks up, and there is something scoured out and rebuilt behind her eyes. “I swore an oath to protect Coalition citizens. I have apparently spent fifteen years serving the people murdering them. That ends here, at this tower.” She lays her credentials on the table beside Dareth’s weapon—the badge of the Coalition and the blade of the Vakutans laid down on the same battered wood. “I am in. Completely. Use whatever I am.”

Something changes in the room after that, small and enormous at once. Jonah, who has watched all of it with a freight-hauler’s flat skepticism, pours Okafor a cup of the same terrible sludge and says nothing, which from Jonah is very nearly a coronation. Dareth and Torvak fall into the clipped shorthand of soldiers who have bled together. Kalen stops going rigid every time the frightening people speak. We are, impossibly, becoming a thing. Not a squad. A small stubborn conspiracy of our own, aimed square at the enormous cruel one that has been devouring all of us.

And partway through assembling the machine that might get every one of us killed, I notice the fear has changed its shape. It is still here. But it has stopped being the hand on the wheel. Because after three years of only ever trying to keep a few people from dying a little longer, I am finally trying to end the reason they were dying at all. That is not survival. That is hope, and hope, it turns out, is a far better fuel.

I look around the crowded control room—at the allies I once feared, the refugees I chose, the boy learning to splice a relay with steady hands, the male who swore to put himself between me and an army—and something creeps in that I have not felt since the day my family was handed its folded flag: the belief that the future might be something other than a list of people to grieve.

Tomorrow the armies come. Tonight we have a plan, and one another, and a truth large enough to matter. It is more than these three years have ever given me.

CHAPTER 24

TORVAK

On the last night before the armies reach us, I do not go to the wall. I go to her.